


Last Damn Truck Stop on the Highway to Hell

by Sholio



Category: Werewolf Marines - Lia Silver
Genre: Alternate Universe - Space, Cuddling & Snuggling, F/M, Genetically Engineered Beings, Hurt/Comfort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-13
Updated: 2015-12-13
Packaged: 2018-05-06 11:21:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,490
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5414912
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sholio/pseuds/Sholio
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Um, yes ... This is a middle-of-the-plot h/c scene from an otherwise nonexistent IN SPAAAAAACE AU of Lia Silver's Werewolf Marines books, written for a friend who was having a terrible day. Actual canon knowledge isn't required (the notes contain everything you need to know). The broader plot is really just an IN SPACE version of the actual plot of the books.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Last Damn Truck Stop on the Highway to Hell

**Author's Note:**

> WEREWOLVES IN SPACE, anyone?
> 
> This is an isolated and contextless h/c snippet from a space AU version of Lia Silver's Werewolf Marines books (specifically the part of the series with Echo and DJ, which begins with [Prisoner](http://www.amazon.com/Prisoner-Werewolf-Marines-Lia-Silver-ebook/dp/B00LFS2W7U/)). All you need to know for purposes of this AU is:
> 
>   * DJ is a werewolf.
>   * Echo is a genetically engineered experiment, part of a set of alphabetical siblings (Althea, Brava, Charlie, etc). She's the only one of the sisters, so far, who didn't come out with major health issues; her sister Charlie survived, but with life-threatening disabilities.
>   * They are currently being held prisoner and experimented on by the same ~evil scientists~ who created Echo, who want to take advantage of DJ's werewolf speed/strength/healing ability.
>   * DJ and Echo are trying to downplay their affection for each other to avoid giving their captors a hold over them. (It is totally obvious anyway.)
>   * No actual spoilers for the books other than the above.
> 


The airlock door slammed shut just as DJ lunged for it. His fingernails scrabbled across the cold metal surface and he stopped himself, clinging to sanity, on the verge of mindless panic.

They wouldn't, he thought.

They wouldn't dare.

He was too useful to them alive.

Through the airlock's small window, Semple watched him with the cool expression of someone watching an interesting test rat.

_They only want to know how I'll respond to panic,_ he told himself, forcing the heaving of his chest down to slower breaths.

It wasn't as if he'd never faced hard vacuum before. It was part of training for the Space Marines -- he'd done it, and he knew Roy had too. They all had. Fifteen seconds of hard vacuum, enough that they knew what it felt like, and how to keep their heads in it. He'd come out of it with a bloody nose and that was it. Other guys had suffered worse; DJ knew that his werewolf healing had cushioned him somewhat.

And he knew, from training, that fifteen seconds was about as long as an unprotected human could stay conscious (longer maybe, for wolf shifters, the analytical part of his brain warned him without being asked), and ninety seconds was the maximum for plausible survival. Some experiments suggested people could survive up to three to four minutes of vacuum, but that was with optimal conditions and a full surgical suite awaiting them on the other side.

Wolf shifters might be able to go longer. As far as he knew, it had never been done. His people were planetside creatures; they were beings of the forest and field. _Precisely because of this kind of fucking idiocy,_ his brain screamed at him.

_She won't do it. She's not going to press that button._

Semple stared him in the eyes and slapped her hand on a button out of his view.

The door behind him, the one to hard vacuum, opened, and the hurricane of forced decompression caught him, and sucked him out.

 

***

 

_"No!"_

Echo was sprinting down the corridor even as she realized what was happening.

"Don't!" Semple snapped, startled as Echo -- nerved beyond her usual level of courage with her keepers -- shoved her aside and slapped the DOOR OPEN button. Nothing happened but a flashing yellow warning symbol. The airlock was still depressurized.

Semple had vented it with DJ in it.

"You," Echo snarled. Her fingers moved quickly on the control panel, repressurizing the airlock to the maximum needed to open it, as fast as possible.

"He needed a lesson," the scientist said simply. "You aren't --"

"I am." The lock was pressurized. She stepped inside, wearing nothing but her usual tank top and jeans.

"We have yet to establish your survival baseline," Semple snapped. 

It wasn't herself they worried about, Echo reminded herself. It was only the amount of money and effort that had gone into the research project.

"I guess this will be a good piece of data for your files then, won't it?" she retorted, and hit the button on the inside of the airlock.

During testing, she'd been through this enough times that she expected the kick of depressurization. Not that she ever got used to it. Not that.

Her body responded automatically to the loss of pressure and oxygen. All over, from head to foot, tissues were tightening and her skin was secreting an oil that would temporarily protect her from the damaging effects of deep space. Membranes flicked across her eyes, dimming the light from the stars and the distant sun, and over her eardrums to protect them. Her mouth sealed itself shut -- she would never, ever get used to that, or the instant suffocating feeling as her nostrils sealed themselves as well.

No amount of genetic engineering could ever replace the need of any Earth-based, carbon-based organism for oxygen. Her body was now switching itself into emergency repair mode. Her tissues would be cannibalizing themselves in order to survive. But, most importantly, she would stay conscious far beyond the brief window the human brain was permitted by its usual biology. It had been determined, in the scientific planning that had produced her, that under vacuum conditions, remaining conscious was the most important consideration in survival. She really couldn't argue. And so she would stay awake while her body died around her, until and including the failure of her heart, should she remain outside the base too long.

She kicked off from the inside of the airlock, and as she did so, she thought, _They knew you'd do this. This is only another test, for you AND for him._

And an awful damn risk of all the research they'd paid for. But, she thought, they had her genetic material. They could make more clones, and try again and again, perfecting their subjects each time.

She was not the ultimate expression of her genotype. She was only the most recent.

DJ, meanwhile, was wholly expendable. They'd scanned him, and saved tissue samples. They were probably confident of their ability to clone him as well.

_But,_ she thought, kicking into the still silence between the stars, _he is the only DJ that I will ever have. They may clone him, but it will not BE him, any more than a clone of me would be me and not Charlie or Althea._

She dived like a dolphin into the ice-cold space between the stars. She felt the cold, but only distantly through the coating on her skin. She had almost forgotten the strange stomach-clenching madness of zero gravity, the way her body wanted to react with vertigo to the unguessable depthless fall to the moon so far below her -- and then failed, because her reptile hindbrain had no ability to understand the distances involved.

The great arc of the orbital base glittered behind her with its thousands of lights and its sweeping arms; the arc of the moon glowed gold and red beneath her. And between her swan dive and that infinitely huge and yet infinitely small planetary arc, she glimpsed DJ.

He'd shifted, perhaps instinctively, perhaps in a conscious attempt to protect himself with fur and the relative resilience of his wolf. He was curled on himself, tumbling slowly, driven only by inertia. The torn remnants of his clothing floated with him.

The terrifying thought occurred to her that she might miss him, and spin slowly into infinity -- two small ships, passing in the great wide interstellar night.

But -- no. She would not allow it. There was nothing to brake from, no resistance in the endless emptiness, but she had spent enough time practicing zero-g maneuvers that she knew all the tricks. As she arced in DJ's general direction, she twisted and shed her shoes, socks, and jeans. It was that much less protection against vacuum, but like any good rocket, she knew that shedding mass would provide momentum. She just had to make the direction count. Her brain stepped in for her, providing calculations and angles, and she released her own particular brand of rocket fuel at the point that she judged to be the exact optimal pivot. A small, compact, muscular rocket, clad only in a tank top and panties, she arrowed towards DJ's furry, curled shape, and as her body struck his, she wrapped her arms around him.

She had him. _She had him._ And now they were tumbling through space, for she'd picked up _his_ momentum to add to her own.

He was not limp in her arms, but rigid. She tried not to read too much into it. Total unconscious and seizures were both plausible reactions to vacuum. She could feel the turgidity of the gases still contained in his body, pressing against his skin under the furry pelt. She could feel the same thing happening to herself.

How much time? Thirty seconds? Forty? She curled herself around his body, trying to keep herself focused and think of ways to change their trajectory. Right now, they were spinning deeper and deeper into space.

She squirmed, disrobing without caring what Semple and her acolytes made of it. More rocket fuel for the only maneuver that mattered: changing course. She hooked the tattered remains of DJ's jeans out of what her brain insisted on thinking of as _the air_ , simply because the human brain (or whatever her brain was) wanted to think of its milieu as _air_ despite all evidence to the contrary.

_Don't throw,_ she counseled herself. At the right point in the tumble, she simply had to ... release.

Naked now, her muscles cramping, the cold eating into her, she rolled slowly in the direction she'd chosen. It was not enough. She could see the long glittering arm of the base in front of her ... now off to her right ... and it was _not enough._ She hadn't been able to change their direction, hadn't been able to counter their tumbling between the stars.

They were both going to die out here. DJ was already unconscious. Lucky man ... lucky wolf. She was going to be conscious, eyes wide open and staring at the stars, for every second of her slow demise, while the life went out of the wolf's body in her arms.

"And it was still worth it." She didn't speak the words aloud, but shaped them with her sealed and breathless lips. 

And then she did something she had never done on the base, never done where there were cameras everywhere and no casual touch or act of love was unrecorded. She curled herself to DJ's open mouth and placed her chaste, breathless lips on the corner of his canine jaws.

Disgusting? Anyone who dared say so was a fool. She pressed her mouth to his, her face to his, and she told herself that if she died here, Charlie would know why she'd done it, and DJ's Space-Marine friend, wherever he was, would surely not be too much worse off than he was anyway. She buried her face in his fur, and told herself, _Charlie, please forgive me. They pushed me to it. May they not punish you too harshly for the things they made me do._

Light, half-blinding her, roused her from the stupor of her slowly fading consciousness.

Echo raised her head, blinking, while her fine hair starfished around her face in her slow tumble with DJ. The light played across her again, some sort of search light from a small and mobile one-person craft.

Whose?

The little craft delicately matched their trajectory, and she caught the breath she was not breathing. It was Push driving that thing.

Now Echo only hoped she was here to save them and not kill them.

The craft was designed for making small repairs to the external features of the base. Its narrow but agile grapple arms caught Echo with more delicacy than she expected. Her body rocked on its new base, but she felt little except the strange spin of momentum deferred. There was no gravity here, but her body still expected it. She was held in the grapple arms; her own grip on DJ was the only thing that kept him from spinning off into the distant dark.

They were now past the magic ninety-second mark. Before this, all retrieved test subjects survived. Now they were into the territory of uncertainty and magic thinking, where some lived and some did not, and no one knew why.

Echo did not shiver and did not breathe, for her remade body was capable of doing neither, and instead held to DJ with all the strength that was left in her.

For a change, Push's piloting was restrained and careful, guiding them in with little nudges to the repair vessel's thruster's. The airlock they docked at was way out on Arm B, nowhere near the one where Semple had spaced DJ. Push, or perhaps her pack leader, was strategizing. Good sign, but right now, all Echo cared about was getting back inside, where DJ could get oxygen. 

Her own muscles felt strange -- weak and limp and burning like the depths of a day-long exertion. She knew why, but she didn't care. Any amount of damage could be repaired. The loss of DJ's life was not a thing that could be fixed.

Two minutes, plus.

The airlock door opened and they tumbled inside. It closed soundlessly behind them and sudden gravity caught them, sent them sprawling to the floor with a bruising impact. Echo rolled automatically, trying to catch DJ for reasons she couldn't entirely articulate. It wasn't as if he would be seriously injured by the fall.

Her head arched back and she realized, distantly, that she was instinctively trying to breathe. Before she could be lost in the depths of panic, her body responded to rising O2 levels in the airlock and the membranes across her mouth and nose retracted into her skin. She gasped, and gasped, and kept gasping as only only now her body told her how much she had needed the air she wasn't getting.

She felt ice-cold and desperately shaky all over. But right now, all that mattered was the wolf in her arms. Echo sat up, with DJ's body sprawled heavy across her legs in their newfound gravity. His jaws were open, purplish tongue lolling out. Horribly, his eyes were half-open, staring at nothing.

As far as she could tell, he was not breathing.

"No, DJ," she said, cold as vacuum and much fiercer. "No, I did not jump into space for you just so you could do this."

She offloaded the wolf to the floor, and sat up, straddling him. Her hands pressed down on his neck, trying to feel through all the fur for a pulse.

Was that a flutter?

_Two minutes and a half,_ said the clock in the back of her head.

DJ's jaws were open and slack, not breathing. "You fucker," she said aloud, and gripped his muzzle firmly in her hand. With both hands cupped to prevent air escaping, she breathed into his mouth and nose.

It wasn't disgusting. There was a part of her that thought maybe it should have been. But it wasn't, because this was DJ, and nothing about him could ever disgust or revolt her. She forced her air into his mouth, even while her arms trembled for lack of oxygen, even while the world tilted around her and her situational awareness shrank to only her, and him, and the need to make sure that there was air for him, even if there was none left for her --

DJ's body arced in her arms, and the transformation was sudden, unexpected. Without warning it was soft human lips under hers, lips that were moving, trying to suck in a breath on their own.

She recoiled in surprise, sitting up while DJ choked and gasped for air. It was a human body in her arms now, compact and muscular, and purpled with bruises from the damage it had take under the abuse of vacuum. Her own limbs were smooth and undamaged, but thinner than usual, and she was shivering now with the buildup of toxicity in her veins -- ketones and steroid breakdown products and she didn't even know what else. She was shaky and nauseated and weak.

_And alive._

_We are alive._

She got to her feet and picked up DJ, staggering a little under his weight. He still seemed to be unconscious, and she hoped to hell it was _only_ unconsciousness, and not something worse. By all rights she ought to be hauling him straight to the medbay, but she had absolutely no trust in anyone right now.

With pressure equalized in the airlock, the door opened readily, and she stumbled into the corridor with DJ's deadweight sagging in her arms. Push had dumped her in an airlock near their quarters. Surely it couldn't have been by design -- there wasn't time for that -- but it was convenient. She didn't want to talk to anyone, or deal with anyone. She just wanted to get DJ somewhere she could get him warmed up and make sure he was okay.

_They planned this,_ she thought as she stumbled, reeling with a weariness that left her dizzy. She was aware of a vague and distant hunger, and a desperate thirst. _They weren't trying to kill DJ, just testing him. Testing us both._ Push couldn't have scrambled the little repair vessel so quickly. She'd been out there already, waiting. Maybe she'd been on a legitimate errand. Maybe not.

The main question was, what had they wanted to find out, really? How much time a wolf shifter could survive in hard vacuum? How well Echo could operate under those conditions in an emergency situation? 

Or maybe just how far she was willing to go, to protect DJ. _I wonder how much I've compromised us both,_ she thought wearily.

_I keep thinking I'm making my own decisions, only to find that all my choices were decided for me ..._

But she couldn't have done anything differently. _Wouldn't_ have.

She punched in the code for her quarters by rote, working on autopilot in her haze of exhaustion, discomfort, and worry. She hoped desperately that she wasn't making a mistake, a potentially fatal mistake, by keeping DJ away from the medical staff. She knew her judgment was compromised right now.

But he was breathing and his pulse felt strong. His color was starting to come back a little, though his skin was still ice-cold and an unhealthy-looking mottled patchwork of broken capillaries and bluish gray. Her quarters had a selection of medical supplies due to her habit of looking after herself after missions where possible, and she was fairly sure that DJ's fast healing was handling the worst of it. Mainly, she just needed to get him warm and get some electrolytes into him.

... and the same for herself, too. The world was turning ominously gray around the edges.

She closed the door and sealed it on the highest security setting she was allowed. Semple or Dowling could override it, as could a handful of other authorized people in a stationwide emergency, and Charlie had a special code -- but it would keep out the run-of-the-mill base staff, and that was the best she could manage.

One perk of being who and what she was -- her quarters had an unusually large and luxurious bathroom by orbital station standards, though DJ had complained about finding it cramped. There was no tub, of course, but she was able to fit both of them into the shower enclosure, doubling up DJ with his knees to his forehead. There were no complicating clothes to take off either of them, so she simply slapped the door shut and turned on the water. A hot patter fell on them like rain. This was something else DJ had occasionally complained about ("I've been stationed on outsystem Marine outposts that had better water pressure than this place!") but for this purpose, it was perfect, filling the shower enclosure with heat and steam without half-drowning them.

As the warm rain fell, as DJ began to shiver -- a good sign; it meant he was warming up -- Echo found herself relaxing, the rigidity in her muscles giving way to a warm lassitude. She was still desperately, terribly thirsty; her body had robbed itself of water to keep her skin lubricated and her mucus membranes from boiling off. She tipped her head back, mouth open, and drank the warm metal-flavored water, but it wasn't enough.

"Stay here," she told DJ. She checked his pulse and respiration again -- both were fine -- and left him propped against the side of the shower enclosure with his head tipped out of the spray. It wouldn't open while the water was falling, so she palmed it off long enough to get out, then re-engaged it as she left.

Her communication implants were providing a constant stream of alerts from various station personnel. Medical and Semple had both messaged her repeatedly, and there was one attempt from Dowling as well. Echo revoked all of them without thought. If they really wanted to, they could override even her implant security protocols, forcing their words on her without permission, but they had discovered in the past just how badly she reacted to _that,_ and now it seemed they'd learned to reserve it for true emergencies.

She drank several cups of water from the sink. Damp and naked, she was shivering now, so she raised the temperature in her quarters with a thought.

The door chimed. She ignored it, and knelt to open the storage cabinet under her bed, where she kept the med stuff in a set of plastic crates. Over the years, between her own field-related injuries and her sisters' health issues, she'd cobbled together a set of medical supplies that were nearly the equal of anything in the medbay except for the full life support cradle. What she needed for DJ right now, though, were the simpler items. 

As she pulled out handfuls of electrolyte packets and stimulant patches, there was a sudden thump from the bathroom. Reflex kicked in and Echo was on her feet and running for the bathroom before she had made the conscious decision to do so. Through the tinted plastic of the shower enclosure, she glimpsed the water-rippled flashes of DJ moving -- it looked like aimless thrashing, and her heart rate skyrocketed; seizure? She palmed off the water from the outside control, and the door opened instantly, spilling a groaning, wet, and half-conscious DJ into her arms.

Not a seizure, she realized, as he continued to struggle feebly with her. He just didn't know where he was. His eyes were open, blinking, but she recalled that a common side effect of prolonged vacuum exposure was temporary blindness; he probably couldn't see, which was contributing to the panic.

"DJ, calm down." She gripped him firmly, holding him to her chest. She kept talking, nonsense words more than anything, until he stopped struggling and his breathing began to settle back into a healthier pattern. Winding down, she asked, "Can you hear me?" and got no answer. His eardrums might have been damaged as well, or maybe he was still too out of it.

In any case, even with the temperature coming up in her quarters, sitting here wet on the floor was doing neither of them any good. She picked DJ up again and carried him to her bed, rerouting, as she did so, several more incoming calls from various parties. One of whom was Charlie. Great, she thought with a kind of black humor as she laid DJ's damp body on the sheets. They were really calling in the big guns now. And Charlie wasn't likely to stop until she got an answer.

She sat on the edge of the bed -- keeping her hip and leg in contact with DJ, which seemed to help keep him calm -- and leaned down to pick up the scattered medical supplies she'd dropped. She peeled med patches off their backing: a mild stimulant, an analgesic, one to increase oxygen uptake in tissues and promote healing. Which reminded her that supplemental oxygen might be a good idea as well, especially if his lungs had been damaged. She unfolded an oxy mask and settled the clingy film over his mouth and nose. This provoked another flurry of struggling. "DJ, settle down," she told him firmly, and leaned over him to kiss his forehead, pressing as much of her body against him as possible. This seemed to calm him down, for the time being anyway, enough that she could get up and retrieve a cup of water from the bathroom. She mixed in electrolytes and glucose from the med kit, drank a cup herself (grimacing at the taste) and then mixed one up for DJ.

By now he was a lot calmer, and somewhat more responsive. She sat up against the wall and propped him up against her chest, peeled back the oxy mask and gave him small sips of the drink, pausing frequently to make sure he didn't show any signs of becoming ill. He was still shivering a little, but she had the blankets tucked around both of them, and she could feel him relaxing against her, his skin warming slowly against hers.

The door chimed, followed immediately by pounding. "Echo," her sister's voice called, muffled, "you have three seconds to tell me you're not lying unconscious on the floor, or I'm coming in!" At the same time, her implant registered another incoming call from Charlie, whose active social life had given her plenty of practice in simultaneously talking to people in person and over the communication network.

She hadn't expected Charlie to physically show up. Now she had an unpleasant vision of her frail sister trying to run all the way across the base ... "Charlie," she subvocalized over the implant, "don't work yourself into a state, all right? I'm fine. You didn't have to come."

"If you'd answer every once in a while, I wouldn't have to!" Charlie's response came back across the implant. At least the pounding stopped. "What was I supposed to think?"

"That I have everything under control." She set the half-empty cup on the swing-out bedside tray, and settled DJ more comfortably against her chest. One of her hands started stroking his hair, more or less of its own accord.

"Echo, they said you jumped out an airlock, and then locked yourself in your quarters! That doesn't sound like being okay. I tried to raise DJ but he's not answering either."

Put that way, it did sound alarming. "I take it they didn't mention the extenuating circumstances, like DJ going out the airlock first. Not his idea, nor mine either."

There was a brief, alarmed pause. "Is he okay? Are _you_ okay?"

"We're both fine. Not operationally compromised. I promise I'll call Medical first thing if we need it." DJ was fully relaxed now, stretched out against her. She couldn't tell if he was asleep, unconscious, or merely comfortable, but his breathing was slow and steady against her neck. "Right now we just need a little time to ourselves."

"Can I ..." There was uncharacteristic hesitation in her sister's voice. "Can I come in? I just want to, you know. See for myself."

"Are you alone?"

Brief pause. "I promise if I come in, I will be."

Echo sighed. She really didn't _want_ company right now, even her sister's. And she thought DJ might prefer to lick his wounds, metaphorically speaking, an audience. On the other hand, the idea of having Charlie nearby was oddly, viscerally satisfying, in a way she couldn't quite articulate to herself. And Charlie would provide an extra layer of intervention between Echo and the people she was very sure she could not deal with right now without losing control.

"Only you," she said, and sent a carefully precise instruction to the door: unlock, let one individual through, and relock afterwards.

When the door opened, Charlie glided through in the hoverchair that Medical insisted she use whenever she wanted to go anywhere farther than across the interior of her own quarters. The door clunked promptly shut behind her and the lock engaged with a click. She looked over her shoulder in surprise. "Wow, you are serious about the security around here, aren't you?"

"Well, considering that Semple tried to kill me and DJ this afternoon, I think some precautions are in order." She had to force herself to speak plainly, knowing the conversation would be overheard and reported. But the events at the airlock would also be a matter of record, regardless of how they were doctored and spun later.

"She ... are you serious?" Charlie disengaged the hoverchair's restraints and slid over the side; the chair settled gently to the floor.

"Does it sound like the kind of thing I'd joke about?"

"I forgot, you're allergic to humor." Charlie sat on the edge of the bed and frowned at what was visible of DJ, which was just the scruff of the top of his head sticking out from under the blankets. Echo had managed to restrain her hair-petting tendencies now that there was an audience, even if it was a sympathetic audience, but her traitor hand had slipped down instead to rest on the soft skin where his neck met his shoulder. She could feel his pulse jumping against her fingers, reassuringly steady. 

"You look okay," Charlie said. "I mean, your color's good and everything. Just a little red. I don't think I've ever seen you sunburned before."

"I told you I was fine," Echo pointed out, which was less convincing than she'd like since she was currently tucked under a blanket nest and it was the wall, mostly, keeping her up. "You know I can handle vacuum."

"Yes, but it's not _good_ for you. I hated it when they were making you do those tests."

Echo decided not to mention that she'd been out today longer than even her testers and trainers had been willing to expose her to hard vacuum, and with a lot less skin protection. 

Charlie's sympathetic gaze dropped to DJ, or rather the DJ-sized lump under the blankets. "He should probably be in Medical, you know. He's not built for it like you are."

"I know. And I swear, at the first hint of a major problem, I'll be calling them fast enough to make your head spin. But otherwise ..." She stopped herself short of saying that she'd break those bastards' fingers if they touched him. People were listening. And she'd done enough damage to the tattered shreds of their cover already. "-- I just don't see the point," she went on. "Medical is for people who are really, truly sick. He's not. He woke up as soon as I got him in the shower, and I think after some sleep he'll be back up to adequate operational functionality."

Charlie rolled her eyes at Echo fondly -- _laying it on a little thick there, sis?_ \-- but she played along. "He looks all right. Better to sleep here than get poked and prodded by Medical, I guess." She gave a little shudder.

" _I_ certainly don't want to deal with waking him," Echo said. "I've learned all too well what he's like when he doesn't feel well."

"Mmmm." Charlie stretched out along the side of the bed.

"I thought you were just going to peek in on ... me --" She'd almost said _us_ ; changed it at the last minute, "-- and then leave."

"I don't remember promising anything of the sort," Charlie said, pillowing her head on her arm.

Three people on the bed was too crowded for Echo's comfort; she worried someone was going to fall off. But then she thought of what DJ had told her about wolf shifters, and the way their family would pile around them when they were ill. Maybe feeling the press of bodies against him would make DJ feel better, even if they weren't his pack, not really.

And, for a painful instant, she felt the whip-sting of nostalgia for those days when she and her sisters were young -- when they'd all pile together, giggling and talking and falling asleep draped on each other.

"You're sure you wouldn't like to leave."

"Nope," Charlie said, and to back it up, she rolled closer. Echo and DJ were now snugged up against the wall, with Charlie spread out along the side of the bed towards the room, her body stretched out alongside theirs.

Echo gave up. She thought down the lights, leaving just the most minor glow to see by. She should probably get up and eat something, but the glucose-electrolyte solution was keeping her going for now. Mostly she was just exhausted.

"I feel it only fair to warn you," she said sleepily, "that I've had a couple liters of water to drink, so I will probably be needing to climb over you before too long."

Charlie giggled into her arm. "That's terrible. I may never forgive you."

Another query reached her from Dowling. She couldn't keep ignoring them. She packaged up a careful little message -- _Everything is fine, no medical assistance required; ask Charlie if you don't believe me_ \-- and sent it off rather than opening a two-way link.

She devoutly hoped that Dr. Semple was getting her ass handed to her for risking valuable research subjects.

With that pleasant thought, she adjusted herself into a more comfortable position, snuggling down beneath the covers with her arms wrapped around DJ and her sister beside them. DJ seemed to be sleeping comfortably, his head tucked against her neck, breath ghosting across her collarbone.

Just to be on the safe side, she set a few alarms to be sure she'd wake instantly if anyone tried to get in, and set her implants to vigilance mode. And then, drifting in warmth, with people she loved nearby, she let go for a little while.


End file.
